En Passant

The Gosford incident, the Nauru files, Don Dale and increasing racial violence are indicative of wider systemic racism, writes John Passant in Independent Australia.

Pauline Hanson is one expression of the 30 years of state Islamophobia, racism, locking up refugees, the Northern Territory intervention etc etc. We need to fight Hanson AND the Labor and Liberal policies that create the cesspit in which she and all the others like her can and do live. We need to build a mass movement.

I wrote in Independent Australia on Monday that Hanson’s resurgence combined with a Coalition Government and a renewed racialised right in the Reclaim Australia movement, signal dangerous times for Australian politics. To read the whole article click here. The Coalition, Hanson’s resurrection and the rise of racism

The possibility of a populist Hanson and a neo-Nazi right within Reclaim Australia finding common ground, as they appear to be doing, is frightening. It could herald the development of a proto-fascist organisation, based on the disaffected middle and lower classes and racist fear-mongering. We need to gather our forces and begin the fight against the racist Reclaim (White) Australia movement. It is better to remove the weeds before they destroy the garden than after they have. Apply the weedicide now, not when the weeds have overrun the garden and it is too late.

As humanity faces possible destruction because of climate change, as the free marketeers cling grimly and absurdly to their non-solutions, as the middle class begins to chaff further and further at its decline, as disaffected workers look to the right for answers, the need for an alternative voice, a voice of revolution and socialism and human liberation, has never been greater.

In Australia the underlying social conditions and the ‘knock me down with a feather’ radicalism of the Greens, plus the numerical weakness of the revolutionary left, and Labor’s capitulation to capital and embrace of neoliberalism, all mean that a resurgent Hansonism (probably without Hanson) is possible.

The best way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to build the social and industrial movements and the revolutionary left and reclaim the traditions of struggle to better the wages and conditions of working people and provide a real alternative to Hansonism.

The Great Recession is polarising politics.  As the crisis deepens the extreme right will gain a hearing. Radical reaction is growing again in the womb of society. Pauline Hanson won 22 percent of the vote in one electorate in the Queensland election on Saturday. The Liberals are shifting further to the Right. Her supporters, to generalise, come from […]